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THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORIC RESEARCH 

FOB THE 

THEOLOGICAL STUDENT OF TO-MY ; 



Rev. HUGH MACDONALD SCOTT, B. D., 

At his Inauguration as Sweetser and Michigan Professor op 
Ecclesiastical History in "Chicago Theological Seminary, 

WITH i UCf* J?-?, 

\* 883 

THE CHAKGE, 

By Eev. TRUMAN M. POST, D. D. 



PUBLISHED BY VOTE OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS. 



CHICAGO: 

Jameson & Mobse, Pbintebs. 
1882. 



INAUGUKAL SERVICES. 



The public exercises in connection with the Inaugu- 
ration of Rev. Hugh Macdonald Scott, B. A., B. D., as 
Sweetser and Michigan Professor of Ecclesiastical 
History, took place on Tuesday Evening, April 25th, 
1882, in the First Congregational Church, Chicago, 
111. ; E. W. Blatchford, Esq., President of the Board of 
Directors, presiding. 

The Services were as follows : 

Invocation by Rev. F. Bascom, D. D., Hinsdale, 111. 

Reading of the Scriptures by Rev. N. A. Hyde, D. D., 
Indianapolis, Ind. 

Declaration of Faith, by the Professor Elect. 

Charge, by Rev. T. M. Post, D. D., St. Louis, Mo. 

Inaugural Prayer, by Rev. G. F. Magoun, D. D., Grin- 
nell, Iowa. 

Inaugural Address, by Prof. Scott. 

Benediction, by Rev. Edward M. Williams, Minne- 
apolis, Minn. 

The Charge and Address are published by vote of 
the Board of Directors. 



THE CHARGE. 



My Dear Brother : 

As this evening you are to be inau- 
gurated in the chair of Ecclesiastical History in Chi- 
cago Theological Seminary, I have been deputed, in 
behalf of the Directors of the Seminary, to address 
to you, in connection with our cordial gratulation and 
welcome, the charge customary on such occasions, 
relative to the duties and functions of that department 
of instruction committed to you; more, perhaps, from 
a regard to the moral proprieties of the occasion and 
a fitting recognition of its solemn importance, than 
from a feeling of the need of such suggestion or 
reminder to you from myself. And yet my utterances 
will be no mere matter of form. Indeed I could not 
well overstate my sense of the solemnity of the trans- 
action in which we are engaged — a transaction which 
commits it over to you, in the instruction of this Insti- 
tution, to set forth and interpret the story of the Church 
of Christ — to present in truthful historic picture its 
spirit, methods, aims and achievements, its errors and 
dangers, its disasters and its victories. I know of no 
department that applies itself more widely and vari- 
ously to all the elements of christian character and 
action. So vast and varied are its themes and inter- 
ests, so wide its range of aspects and situations, so 



THE CHARGE. 



manifold its suggestions and instructions and its ap- 
peals to our judgments and our sympathies, that it 
seems to address itself to every side of our nature; 
and that no department of instruction can more power- 
fully affect the entire cast and complexion of christian 
manhood or do more to determine the theory and 
practice of the christian life of the individual or of the 
Church, and the question of our proper sympathy with 
God's idea and purpose in his kingdom on earth. And 
when I reflect how much it will lie with you, by your 
own mental attitude and sympathy, and by the adjust- 
ment of light and shadow, standpoints and aspects, 
setting and environment, to affect the entire impres- 
sion and lesson of the picture, there seems to me com- 
mitted to your hands, in dealing with the minds of the 
students in interests of mightiest moment, a plastic, 
almost a creative power that oppresses me with a sense 
of the vastness of responsibility that rests on you. 
When, moreover, I reflect that these minds are to be 
among the master-builders of the House of God — the 
founders and primordial architects of christian churches 
in this new and rising world of the Northwest — -when 
I reflect on all these things, I feel that nothing can 
transcend the solemnity of your position or its respon- 
sibilities, or the urgency of supplication which it re- 
quires in the outset and will require constantly in all 
the future, should ascend for the baptism of that Spirit 
which gives light and serenity and energy to the hu- 
man mind, and for the overshadowing presence of that 
Christ whose living consciousness pervades and whose 
heart-beat pulsates through the entire life of the Church 
from its genesis in time till it emerges in the upper 
glory. 



THE CHARGE. J 

And here it befits first of all that we note that the 
Spirit we thus invoke is the Spirit of Truth, and 
that your first concern and quest in your office is truth; 
that you anchor it in the very depth of the soul that 
God is served or honored of no lie; that gt>od is shel- 
tered or fostered of no falsehood; that iron mixed with 
the clay is sure to collapse, no matter how grand the 
structure involving the truth with the falsehood in the 
peril of a common ruin; that your function is not to 
foist your own thought as the divine organic idea 
into history and build upon it, but that you educe 
God's idea and plan from his Word and his Provi- 
dence; that God wishes no colored vision, but the 
white light of the very truth ; that it is not yours to be 
the advocate, champion or partisan, or to make a case, 
or to "trammel up the consequences." Some men fear 
truth as dynamite, and handle it as gingerly, lest it 
tear everything to pieces. God requires no Uzza to 
lay profane hand on the ark lest it be jostled and 
wrecked. Your concern is truth; God will care for 
the consequences. It is yours to see, listen and 
report. You need first of all a candor pure as the 
sun — a mind entirely achromatic. 

By an achromatic mind I mean no utter blank, no 
tabula rasa. That were an impossibility, and would 
prove, if possible, an incompetency for your office. 

The very condition of your appointment, the state- 
ment of the creed, assumes certain things as posited. 
Yet the creed is presented chiefly as a criterion of 
your competency to your office and fitness to work in 
harmony with the aims of this seminary; not surely 
as a project and programme of what you are subse- 
quently to find and prove in history. When you open 



8 THE CHARGE. 

that volume you are to dismiss all inquiry but, What is 
truth ? 

But though the mind is to be achromatic, it is not to 
be icy. It is to be like sunlight, warm and genial, as 
well as colorless. You must have an intense and liv- 
ing sympathy with the history you pursue in order 
truly to know it. You must feel into its very reality 
in order truly to apprehend and utter it. You want 
in history not a skeleton of dry bones, wired together 
by dates and dogmas, but the very resurrection of the 
dead with all their living personality and human heart- 
beat. You want more than the bare, isolated facts; 
you want facts with their environment; you want a 
living sympathy with the conditions and circumstances 
in order to the proper setting of truths. Truths apart 
from their settings are but half-truths, often the worst 
of lies — such as set men and peoples crazy. 

Again, you are to study Church history as a life; as 
one life, under the inbreath of one Spirit and the pres- 
ence of one Christ. You are to study it as a human 
life, not of the angelic orders; as a family life, not of 
aliens or masters, but of fathers and brothers, of men 
like yourself, compassed with infirmities, trials and 
sufferings. 

You are to study it as a perpetual life, without break 
or syncope, often hid it may be, yet always existent; 
not traceable always through hierarchies or dynasties, 
through prelates or princes, through temporal or spir- 
itual Caesars. Often that life shrinks from the con- 
spicuous fields of history, from the heights to the 
lowly vales and hidden glens, from the cathedral to 
the cottage, from the courts and capitals, the Canter- 
burys and Romes of history to the hovel, the cata_ 



THE CHARGE. 9 

comb, the wilderness, the dens and caves of the earth. 
Yet you must have faith in its perpetual existence be- 
fore God and in human souls, and as revealed to many 
exiled Elijahs in the procession and proclamation of 
God through the lonely waste. 

You must study history as having under God one 
life-trend. You may not always clearly trace it — may 
not thread its seeming labyrinths or unravel its tangled 
maze. Often its movement may seem devious — often 
retrograde, and giving of itself no explanation; tedi- 
ous, weary, objectless as the Exode. And yet it may 
be the briefest course to the desired goal — the briefest 
in accordance with the eternal laws of the divine econ- 
omy, and of the human mind. The pilgrims have to 
be fitted to the promised inheritance, and the sweep 
of the movement must be broadened to carry with it 
the world. The deviation and retrogression are by 
the force of the same laws that bear it on to ultimate, 
complete success. They broaden its current, deepen 
its channels, accumulate its flood and its force to break 
through new obstacles and rush into new rapids; even 
as the Mississippi, while seemingly mazed in endless 
zigzag around cliffs and headlands and through morass 
and wilderness is meanwhile waiting and deflecting to 
receive the affluents of half a continent, and is all the 
time, every drop of it, under the grasp of one great 
law bearing it swift and straight as the face of the 
world will permit to the great gulf. 

Again, you must study the life of the Christian 
Church as a germinal, progressive, adolescent life — one 
after Christ's own similitude of a vegetable growth; 
a development from embryonic germs, unfolding and 
uplifting ever to new altitude, strength, beauty and 



IO THE CHARGE. 

fruitage — one destined to exhibit, with perpetual iden- 
tity of germs, changes of outward form and aspect — 
as of blade, stalk, leaf, flower, "the ear and the full 
corn in the ear." Nor are we to be surprised or dis- 
mayed if amid its changes it exhibits at times exfolia- 
tions analogous to those of the shrub or tree, the cast- 
ing off of foliage which, having served its time in 
ministering to life and growth, but having become 
incompetent longer to do so, will, if retained, only 
obstruct, bind up and smother its life, and breed in it 
mould and decay. Kindly autumn comes and strips 
off the dead leafage and leaves the tree bare, seem- 
ingly blasted and dead. But it is not death, only the 
preparation for a new, stronger, loftier, more majestic 
and fruitful life. So it is at times with the germinant 
life and growth of the kingdom of God; periods of 
exfoliation come, periods of change, which are like the 
turning over of a new page; not that the former page 
has been useless, but it has been read, has given its 
story and lessons, and fulfilled its office, and being 
unturned, it would cover the one next in the continu- 
ous volume. 

Such a germinal growth is presented in repeated 
symbols, by Christ himself, as representative of the 
life of his Church on earth. His instructions in them 
forbid the idea of some perfect paradigm, some type 
of completed life and growth in some past era or 
epoch — some authoritative model, cast in eternal ste- 
reotype, toward which all subsequent times, conditions 
and peoples must ever work. Under the perpetual 
presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit, history shows 
us such a germinal development, — a development 
which did not stop with the Apostles or the Fathers, 



THE CHARGE. I I 

nor yet with the Reformers or the Pilgrims ; a devel- 
opment not limited or bound up by Origen or Athan- 
asius or Augustine, or by Wyckliffe, or Luther, or 
Calvin, or Edwards, or Wesley ; which has not pre- 
sented its final outcome in the platforms of Nice, or 
Augsburg, or Geneva, or of Wesminster, or Savoy, 
or Saybrook, or Cambridge, or of Boston. These are 
landmarks of movement, not ultimate barriers or con- 
summations. They are not final utterances of Chris- 
tian thought, nor have we reason to believe such 
utterance will be delivered until the second coming of 
the Lord. Now, this does not imply that the Church 
has learned nothing, gained nothing, settled nothing, 
in the past centuries. The child has learned some- 
thing, gained something, settled something, yet he 
continues to grow and to learn; and this because he 
has gained, learned and settled something. But the 
past has changed by incorporation into a larger future. 

Changes, in order to be genuine progress, must be 
developments of germs which are primordeal and 
immortal. Forms and formulations, the offspring of 
certain conditions of mind and of the world, are liable 
to change with those conditions. If they are dead — 
have no longer congruity with the mind and life of 
the world — they must be cast off, or they work ob- 
struction, disease, and gangrene. Aspects and phases 
of thought or speech, which have served their end to 
special times and cultures which are past, must give 
place to others, or disaster will ensue. 

Who that has walked amid the terrible frescoes of 
the Santo Campo in Pisa, or those of the Last Judg- 
ment in the Sistine chapel in the Vatican, or whose 
imagination has been led by Dante through the hor- 



12 THE CHARGE. 

rors of the circles of eternal sin and sorrow, and seen 
in those depicted certain forms of thought attaching to 
the orthodoxy of the middle ages, has not felt that 
there were presented certain ideas of God and Christ, 
which, of whatever service they may have been in the 
rude and gloomy ages preceding, the Church must in 
time cast off or die ; or, at least, cumbered with them, 
could not move on to the future conquest of the world. 

But, on the other hand, while we recognize as true 
this germinal theory of church life, we are still to bear 
in mind, that history, together with reason and Scrip- 
ture, admonishes us there are limits to changes which 
we may not pass ; there are changes which are not 
germination, but extirpation, — where a break, even 
from the closures of the old prison-house, in a given 
direction, were only a burst into chaos and old night. 
There are transitions with no progress ; exfoliations, 
not unto life; new growths, which are not at all devel- 
opments or outgrowths of the primal immortal germ, 
but only the alien parasitic misletoe feeding on the 
decay of the old stock; or the poison oak or ivy cling- 
ing to the noble monarch of the forest — climbing, and 
killing as it climbs, till at last it flaunts its deadly 
brilliancy high above the stately trunk now dead and 
decaying, and soon to fall. 

The signs of the times emphasize to us the admoni- 
tion of the Apostle John to the churches of his age, 
" Brethren, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits 
whether they are of God." See whether they show 
us a development of the primal principles of Christian 
doctrine and life. 

The past history of the Church, and the aspects of 
the times, admonish us of a media via a middle path, 



THE CHARGE. I 3 

as the one of life, midway between a dead conserva- 
tism and a wild pseudo-reform. To find it now and 
hold it, — here is the patience and faith of the saints, 
here the crisis and agonism of the hour to the Church. 
Woe! worth the day! if she find it not, — the middle 
path the pilgrim found, uplifting in the valley of the 
shadow of death, between the foul morass and mock- 
ing ghouls on the one hand, and on the other the dark 
deeps eddying with eternal flames or screaming with 
everlasting rage and woe. Woe to those who call 
ruin reform, or reform ruin; woe to the iconoclast, 
that mutilates and desecrates the tombs and altars of 
his fathers, or who converts their images to a Chinese 
lararium; woe to him who will not look on the brazen 
serpent, or who perverts it to a fetish ; woe to him 
who cuts himself off from the body of life, and to him 
who binds himself to a body of death; woe to those 
who worship the mummies of hoary Eld, or who — like 
the renegades and apostates seen by Ezekiel through 
the hole in the wall, amid chambers of foul and abom- 
inable imagery, and at last standing between the 
porch and the altar — in their eagerness to worship the 
rising sun, impiously turn their backs on the temple 
of Jehovah ; woe to the wretch that scuttles the ship 
that carries him, or the dotard who ties himself to the 
anchor against the terrors of shipwreck ; woe to him 
who despises and dishonors the infant Church under 
the presence or near memories of Christ and the 
apostles, and to him as well who would crowd eighteen 
centuries and a half of history, experience and pro- 
gress back into the cradle. 

History is no pandect of ecclesiastical law; narrative 
is not legislation; action is not command, even in case 



14 THE CHARGE. 

of inspired men, unless associated with express enact- 
ment or exact parallel analogy. God knows to com- 
mand, if He wills, with all fullness, precision and 
circumstantiality of detail, in matters of form, or order, 
or liturgy, as in the Mosaic Institute. His omission 
to do so in the New Testament is significant. The 
organic principles and immortal germs being given, 
their development and application, as regards phase, 
form and phrase, seems largely relegated to the free 
reason and conscience of men, under the guidance of 
the Divine Spirit and the ever present Christ. 

History is the thesaurus of instances, analogies, 
illustrations, and of the best thought and achievement 
of the past, though neither the thought or achievement 
is divine or of authoritative example. It is an exhibit 
of causes, consequences, tendencies and results, errors 
and disasters, as well as of heroic and martyr doing 
and suffering. It shows also the limits and conditions 
of the progress of the Kingdom of God, and God's 
plan and economy for its final triumph in the conver- 
sion of the world. It summons us to the paths indi- 
cated by Christ, and trodden by the apostles, evan- 
gelists and martyrs of earliest times, as the true way 
to this result. It gives the chart of earlier voyagers, 
and plants danger signals against rock and tempest 
along the deeps over which we are to sail. In all 
these regards history offers vast aids, if we seek from 
it counsel and not authority. It also admonishes us 
of transition periods, their perils and hopes, and the 
necessity of the middle path. 

Within the sphere left open to human freedom we 
may not wonder or be startled at signs of change. 
What we have to see to is that the change be a devel- 



THE CHARGE. I 5 

opment, an unfolding and not uprooting of that planted 
by Christ and his apostles ; that it is merely the re- 
moval of forms of thought which man has created and 
*man may also modify or rescind. Such changes in 
theologic systems often unnecessarily alarm us, as if 
the pillars of the eternal truth itself were shaken. Is 
not God, we ask, is not Christ " the same yesterday, 
to-day, and forever?" Yes! But man is not the same 
yesterday, to-day, and forever ; nor is man's knowl- 
edge of God and his word. Truth is eternally one 
and the same ; but not so is man's science of truth. 
The heavens are from of old unchangeably the same — 
over a Ptolemy, a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Newton, a 
La Place — but not so is Astronomy, man's science of 
the starry universe, nor would their aspect be the 
same to a stand-point on the earth and on Sirius. 
" But," it is urged, " is not Christ's presence promised 
to be with his Church always, and does not this insure 
her unchangeableness? Yes. Christ's promise is to 
us of His perpetual presence, and therein is all our 
hope. But that insures progress, not unimprovable 
perfectness at the beginning. Christ has been with 
the Church in all the past ages, and thereby we know 
what that promise means. That presence is influence 
— not force, not fatalism. It is not, as we clearly see 
in the past, a guaranty of infallibility or impeccability 
to any man, or order, or class, or age, or church, but 
a promise of readiness to aid and guide the willing 
and obedient, and to overrule disaster and failure, so 
as to secure the final victory, and to guarantee to the 
Church that the gates of hell should not prevail against 
it. We glory in that presence, and in it is our confi- 
dence of hope. We rejoice in that presence, a'* still 



1 6 THE CHARGE. 

and ever with us as with our fathers, and as it will be 
with the Church in the coming happier ages. Christ 
still lives, and the Spirit of Truth, and the Eternal 
God, and also the human reason and conscience com- 
muning with immortal truth; therefore, the Church of 
Christ still lives, and with the franchise of freedom 
and of power on her as of old; and she stands, with 
no sphynx face — ever turned toward the climes of 
memory — but like the fourfold visaged cherubim, seen 
by Ezekiel at the river Chebar, full of eyes, and with 
universal outlook, sweeping at once the horizon of all 
the ages. 

Let us not be dismayed at times of transition, as if 
we were in peril of shipwreck ; Christ is on board, — 
" Therefore will we not fear though the earth be re- 
moved, though the mountains be carried into the 
midst of the seas, though the waves thereof roar and 
be troubled, though the mountains shake with the 
swelling thereof. There is a stream whose waters 
shall make glad the city of our God ; God is in the 
midst of her, she shall not be moved ; God shall help 
her, and that right early." Christ is on board ! If 
God be with us, who can be against us ? What shall 
separate us from His love ? Shall things present or 
things to come ; or life, or death, or any other creature ? 
The ship that bears the Christ ! Well may the utter- 
ances of that sweet voice, that has just faded into 
heaven, spoken of another ship, be applied to her. 
Sail on, O ship, that bears the Christ, — 

" Humanity, with all its fears, 
With all its hopes of future years, 

Is hanging breathless on thy fate. 

******** 

" Fear not each sudden sound or shock, 
'Tis of the wave and not the rock, 



THE CHARGE. I 7 

Tis but the napping of the sail, 

And not a rent made by the gale. 

In spite of rocks and tempest's roar, 

In spite of false lights on the shore, 

Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea, 

Our hopes, our hearts are all with thee; 

Our hopes, our hearts, our prayers, our tears, 

Our faith, triumphant o'er our fears, — 

Are all with thee — are all with thee." 

The history of Christianity in the past is of a life. 
It shall be so in the future, — a life climbing ever 
mightier and loftier, in a more inspiring atmosphere, 
and clearer light, and larger vision. It is not to die : 
not till the throb for immortality has ceased in the 
human breast, or an answer, surer and more hopeful 
than that of the risen Christ, shall come to the ages 
applying the ear to the abyss of the grave ; not till 
that risen Christ has ceased to be the uplift of the 
world, His Gospel to be the power of God unto sal- 
vation, and the vision of the beauty and glory of 
Christ has sunk from the gaze of the world into the 
deeps of the eternal past, and the New Jerusalem, with 
its faces of the loved and beautiful and blessed, has 
been resigned by man to everlasting oblivion; not till 
then, shall the stone rolled by the angels from the 
door of the sepulchre be rolled back again, and the 
history of the Church of Christ become epitaph — the 
memory of a dream the sweetest, most beneficent, 
most beautiful, most blessed, that ever descended on 
human vision, but drifting itself to the same grave to 
which it marshalled the deluded race of man. Till 
then history, standing by the open tomb of Him that 
liveth and was dead, and is alive for evermore, shall 
utter with the beloved disciple, "This is the true God 
and eternal life." 



INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 



Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Board of 
Directors: 

Studies are usually divided into direct and oblique, 
or those which are of immediate value by imparting 
knowledge and those which are educative, and are 
prized because of the mental training which they 
afford. The traditional system was largely of the 
former, the modern method is chiefly of the latter 
type. How merry educationists have made them- 
selves over learning by rote, burdening the memory 
with a mass of ill-digested facts, and turning the mind 
into a vast curiosity shop, we need scarcely be told — 
for the laughter is still in our ears. It might be more 
profitable, perhaps, to venture to ask if we have not 
gone just a little too far in this direction ; and, in 
our philosophic desire to cultivate the understanding, 
enliven the fancy and polish the language, may not 
have forgotten to give the mind material enough on 
which to think, and provide our eloquence with 
information enough wherewith to balance it in its 
flight. 

We will certainly be within both the Baconian 
method and the practice of the most progressive 
studies, when we emphasize the supreme importance 
of a wide acquaintance with facts, and of a head full 



20 ALL STUDIES HISTORICAL. 

of the results of other men's labors : for wisdom im- 
plies knowledge ; principles presuppose a familiarity 
with phenomena ; a weighty opinion must be based 
on broad and clear information, and the highest deci- 
sion of the present must rest upon the deepest study 
of the past. The stream of investigation in our day 
runs more than ever before in the direction of the 
historic, and a wide accumulation of facts, to be care 
fully kept in mind, is pronounced an indispensible 
prerequisite to all independent effort. 

The modern scientist deals as much with the science 
of history as with the history of science, — for we are 
pointed everywhere to unity, organism, development. 
Geology is a chronology of the earth, the dates of 
which are to be carefully remembered ; botany tells of 
the generation and migration of plants ; physiology is 
the successive biographies of protoplasm, fish, monkey 
and man; philosophy has become a history of thought; 
morals is traced as the unconscious product of long- 
continued habits ; and religion itself is decided to be 
the historic translation of subjective states into objec- 
tive deities. 

Although we approach the history of the church in 
quite another spirit than that which seems to prevail 
in the studies referred to, we find ourselves in hearty 
agreement with the demands which they make for a 
wide and sweeping knowledge of facts. 

For, what is the foundation of Christianity? It is a 
fact — Christ and His work. Where are these set 
forth? In the Scriptures, especially those of the New 
Testament. What is the New Testament? It is a 
certain collection of books which church tradition has 
given us. Where did the Church get them? Why 



NEW TESTAMENT INTRODUCTION. 2 I 

diH she receive them ? What are they to us ? These 
questions history must answer. Its light alone can 
reveal the time, the circumstances, the authors, the 
receivers, the authority of such writings ; for the testi- 
monium spiritus sancti is no longer appealed to in 
deciding the date of the Apocalyps.e or the canonicity 
of Jude, and the argument from prophecy and miracles 
as proofs of revelation has fallen into neglect, because 
of the general character of the one and the circum- 
stance that the others must themselves be first histori- 
cally defended. 

If, then, the entrance to theology and faith be 
through the canon of Scripture, and the doorway to 
the canon be through history, it will not be inappro- 
priate, in seeking to show the importance of our 
department, to notice at the outset the present state 
of the science of New Testament Introduction, and 
the necessity which it creates for a very special 
acquaintance with the life and labors of the early 
church. 

I. 

Tertullian tells us 1 that in his time the Christian 
was painted by heathen wit as a man with an ass's 
head reading a book. With a little more delicate 
satire the same idea is uttered in our day by the 
advocates of advanced Biblical criticism, in reference 
to what they call the wooden orthodoxy, the slavery 
of the letter, the blind traditionalism of unillumined 
Christianity. The so-called dogmatic view of the 
canon of Scripture is pronounced emphatically wrong. 
It leads to an utter perversion of the origin of the 

1 Apologeticus, c. xvi. 



2 2 THE TUBINGEN SCHOOL. 

church ; it brings its advocates into conflict with the 
science and culture of the age ; and to be persevered 
in, after all that modern historic research has brought 
to light, argues either pitiable weakness or wilful 
blindness. 

The apostle and high priest of this critical school 
was Baur of Tubingen (d. i860). He applied the 
Hegelian philosophy to the study of history with a 
marvelous acuteness of vision and almost incredible 
mastery of details, and out of his crucible but five of 
the New Testament books came forth unmixed gold, 
viz., Romans, I. and II. Corinthians, Galatians, and 
the Apocalypse. 

Hilgenfeld, a disciple of this school, claims to follow 
the literary-historic rather than Baur's tendency theory, 
and adds /. Thessalonians, Philemon, and Philippians 
to the genuine books. His historic principle — that of 
the so-called "scientific theology" — in studying the 
New Testament canon, is that "the Apostolic period 
was moved by a contrast — not original, but appearing 
gradually, and therefore capable of being harmonized; 
a contrast which the several books of the New Testa- 
ment represent in its whole course." 1 

Upon the foundation of this Petro-Pauline schism 
two further appearances especially enable these critics 
to pronounce upon the origin of the New Testament 
Scriptures. These are the Roman persecutions and 
the inner crisis caused by Gnosticism. In the light of 
these historic torches we are told that the first Epistle 
of Peter was written under Trajan, — about A. D. 
113, — not only because it echoes the Epistle to the 
Romans, the Epistle of James, and that to the Heb- 

1 Einleitung in d. JV. Test., 1875. Vorwort, S. V. 



HILGENFELD, HOLTZMAN. 23 

rews, but because its notice of busybodies (i Peter 
iv:'i'5) indicates the Delatores, who became active 
again in the reign of Domitian and during the perse- 
cution under Trajan. 1 

// Thessalonians belongs to this period, because the 
"man of sin" is Nero, and the circumstances attend- 
ing him point to the preaching of the Jewish Christian 
Elxai, who lived under Trajan. 2 Hausrath 3 finds in 
6 naTexoDv (2, 7) a punning reference to Claudius! 

Holtzmann, in an elaborate work, 4 proves to a cer- 
tainty, in the eyes of the new school, that the pastoral 
epistles are a product of the first half of the second 
century, and are only possible historically when viewed 
as an effort to promote union in the church in the 
face of distraction, caused by persecution without and 
heresy within. 

Every historic indication, we are informed, is against 
them. No place can be found for them in the life of 
Paul ; they are full of words and phrases drawn from 
the philosophy of the second century ; the gnostic 
heresy attacked is unknown to the apostles ; they 
show a developed church hierarchy not reached till a 
late period ; and the subjective nature of their teach- 
ing betrays in its mediating tendency the irenical 
efforts of the post-apostolic age. Historic criticism, 
therefore, declares they are a continuation of the writ- 
ings of the Pauline tendency, and form a bridge 
between Paulinism and the Logos-Gospel. 5 

The Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians belong 
to the same late period, as is seen in their speculative 

1 Cf. Pliny's letter to Trajan. 2 Hilgenfeld— Elg. p. 648. 

3 Neutestamentl. Zeitgeschichte—Bd. I., p. 102. 

4 Die pastoralbriefe, Kritisch u. exegetisch behandelt, Leipzig, 1880. 

5 Holtzmann — Einleitung. 



24 RESULTS. 

coloring, and are very likely the product of historic 
transition from Christian essenism to gnosticism. This 
is the view of Lipsius. 1 

The Epistle of James, Hilgenfeld sets in the year 
A. D. 90, because it borrows such phrases as rpoxo? 
rr/b ysveeeoQS from Orphic hymns — a realm of gnosti- 
cism of which James could know nothing. 

II. Peter is given up, we are told, by all his- 
toric critics, orthodox and liberal, except Weiss and 
Thiersch. 

If internal evidence, combined with a perfect con- 
sensus of historic indications, is worth anything, the 
Acts of the Apostles and the fourth Gospel cannot be 
the work of Luke and John. On this point the new 
school is unanimous, and regards the question as 
settled. 2 The only apostolic portion of the Gospels is 
the substratum in Matthew and Mark, before it was 
worked over into its present form. 

There are thus, we are told, two periods in New 
Testament literature. The first, the Apostolic, includ- 
ing the genuine epistles of Paul, the Apocalypse, and 
the two oldest synoptic gospels; the second, the post- 
Apostolic, embracing the remaining writings, which 
betray in nearly every instance the pre-existence of 
the others. 3 This deutero-canon, the loftiest part of 
the New Testament, is the result of Christian Platon- 
ism in Alexandria building, in the second century, a 
system upon the foundation laid by Paul. 4 

In other words, at the close of more than thirty 
years historical research, by a school of critics that 
has no superior in solid learning, patient investigation 

1 Gnosticismus, S. 141. 

2 Cf. Holtzman, " Recht u. Pflicht der Biblischen Kritik, 1874, S. 15. 

3 lb., p. 22. 4 Hausrath, N. T. Ztgsch, Bd. III., s. 560. 



CLASSICAL CUSTOM. 25 

and subtle conjecture, we are told that nearly two 
thirds of our New Testament canon belongs to the 
post-Apostolic period, and was quietly put into cir- 
culation under the honored names of Peter, John and 
Paul. Of these later works Hausrath says, 1 " the 
church herself received of the products of this literary 
movement what satisfied her religious need, . . *. . . 
but this choice was more a matter of religious tact 
than a work of historic criticism." Such words as 
fraud and forgery and deception, we are told, at once 
betray a total ignorance of the historic circumstances 
amid which the New Testament writings arose. The 
church's views of literary propriety, the rights of 
authors, and the measure of importance to be assigned 
to the supposed writer were, we are assured, simply 
those of the first centuries ; and how different these 
were from those in our day no careful historian needs 
to be informed. 

It was a well known and common practice among 
classic writers, 2 both Greek and Latin, to publish their 
own views under the name of some great author of 
the past. Every schoolboy remembers, and is not 
•deceived by it, how Livy and Tacitus put speeches 
into the mouth of their historic characters. Plato, 
amid minute details of time and place, makes Socrates 
teach the ideal philosophy, and every student knows 
we have spurious dialogues under the name of Plato 
himself. 

The Neo-Pythagoreans thought they honored their 
master by putting their exposition of his teachings 
into his own mouth. More than fifty such works 

l Ib. Bd. III., s. 559. 

2 Cf. Zeller, Abhandl. Gesch. Inhalts, s. 298. 



26 JEWISH LITERARY METHODS. 

were assigned to Pythagoras, and no one raised a cry 
of forgery or literary dishonesty. 1 In our period this 
became a favorite style of publishing thought. Cicero 
says, 2 " this method of composition, which bases itself 
upon illustrious men of the past, seems, I do not know 
how, to have great weight." 

We are called, further, to observe that Jewish liter- 
ature followed this early custom. The translators of 
the LXX. not only did not hesitate to insert explana- 
tory remarks into their text, but added whole books. 
Susannah and Bel and Dragon were inserted as part 
of Daniel. The Wisdom of Solomon was published 
by a Greek Jew as if a genuine work of that king, 
Ecclesiastes, though claiming to be written by the 
" son of David," even orthodox divines now admit not 
to be from Solomon. The book of Enoch — itself 
apocryphaf— received all kinds of apocryphal additions 
from later hands. Dillmann, speaking of Jewish liter- 
ature in the century before Christ, says, 3 "At that 
time it had become a familiar custom, based on the 
example of certain Old Testament writings, for an 
author to express himself under the name of another, 
putting traditional teaching into the mouth of some 
ancient man of God who lived when the spirit of 
prophecy still spake with men." In the Diaspora the 
Jews carried this tendency so far as to insert lines in 
Homer teaching the Sabbath, and made Orpheus 
speak of the Decalogue. 4 

It would be, then, we are assured, a marvellous 
thing if early Christian writers regarded as a sin what 
both Jews and Greeks considered simply a literary 

1 Holtzmann, R. u. Pf., p. 26. 2 De Amic, I. 4. 

3 Das Buck Henoch iibersetzi u. erkldrt. — Elg. s. xxvi, 1853. 

4 Hilgenfeld, p. 167. 



NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA. 2J 

method. It is pointed out that what constitutes right 
and wrong in actions varies in different ages. Hier- 
onymus, the greatest scholar of his time, speaking of 
the Epistle of James, says, 1 "It is said to have been 
published under the name of James, and may as time 
went on have little by little obtained authority." The 
primitive church was not horrified at the thought of 
interpolated or substituted writings. The important 
matter was the teaching that was offered and not the 
author of it. In proof of this we are bidden consider 
the mass of apocryphal literature which arose in the 
first two centuries. 

And first of all the New Testament itself refers to 
such works. The Epistle of Jude quotes (v. 14-15) 
the " Book of Enoch," an apocryphal writing of the 
first century B. C. ; and II. Timothy (iii. 8) gives 
information from the Assumptio Mosis, written about 
the time of the birth of Christ. The Gospel to the 
Hebrews, once canonical for a part of the church, is 
now lost. 

Various books, now rejected, were regarded as 
authoritative by some early churches and Fathers. 
Irenaeus received the Shepherd of Hermas as Scrip- 
tural Tertullian considered 3 the Book of Enoch 
genuine, and thought Noah might have preserved it 
orally, or have been inspired to restore it. The 
Apocalypse of Peter was received by the Muratorian 
Fragmentist, who also speaks of an Epistle to the 
Laodiceans and another to Alexandria as wrongly 
assigned to Paul. Clement of Alexandria ascribes 
the "Dialogue of Jason and Papiskos" (by Aristo of 

1 Catal. Scrip. Eccl., c. 2. 

2 IV. 3, Cf. also Tertull. De orat, c. xvi. 

3 De Idololatria, c. iv ; De Cult. Fern. i. 3. 



28 CHURCH CRITICISM. 

Pella) to Luke. 1 The Epistle of Clement of Rome 
was read in churches, and is numbered in the canon 
in Codex A. In a Syrian MS. (Paris, 1876, dis- 
covered) it forms part of the New Testament, stand- 
ing after the Pastoral Epistles. The Epistle of Barna- 
bas was Scripture for Origen. The Ebionites received 
the Clementine writings, and referred to the so-called 
" Witness of Timothy " as the words of Jesus. Clem- 
ent of Alexandria did not receive Jude or II. and III. 
John, yet he allowed them to be used in church be- 
cause written in honor of the apostles. The author of 
the pseudo Acts of Paul and Thecla, when charged 
with the fiction, said 2 he did it to magnify Paul. The 
great body of New Testament apocrypha, containing 
among others about filty apocryphal gospels, had a 
similar aim. We name only "The Testament of the 
XII. Patriarchs," the " Protevangelium Jacobi" "The 
Discourse of Peter," "The Acts of Pilate," "The Acts 
of Matthew," "The Acts of Andrew," "The Apoca- 
lypse of Paul," "The Acts of Thomas," the correspon- 
dence between Jesus and Abgar. 

In the first two centuries an unprecedented number 
of such writings arose, and the church, having a faint 
conception of historic criticism, accepted simply, we 
are informed, those which were useful for her purpose. 
How ready she was to act on such a principle is seen 
in the use she made of supposed heathen revelation. 
Justin Martyr appeals to the testimony of the Sibylline 
books, and Clement of Alexandria cites a work of 
Zoroaster, in which, after his return to life, he de- 
cribed the region of the dead. It was but another 
step in jhis direction to produce or use supposed deci- 

1 Scholia ad Dionys. Alex. 2 Tertullian, De Baptismo, c. xvii. 



CANON CLOSED. 29 

sions of Governors or Emperors. Such were the 
spurious edicts of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, fit 
forerunners of the donation of Constantine and the 
Isidoran Decretals. Viewing these things from a 
rationalistic point of view, Lecky exclaims, "The 
immense number of forged documents is one of the 
most disgraceful features of the Church History of the 
first two centuries," 1 and elsewhere (p. 399) speaks of 
" the deliberate and apparently perfectly unscrupulous 
forgery of a whole literature." After more than two 
centuries of such use of fluctuating Scriptures, the 
church was led — by a growing demand for a fixed 
canon in public worship, and by heretical writers who 
published false doctrine under apostolic names — to 
close the collection of sacred literature. The earliest 
attempts were neither exact nor uniform. The Coun- 
cils of Laodicea and Hippo, which first enumerated 
the books, give different lists — neither of which agrees 
with our canon. As Paine coarsely puts it, 2 "Those 
books which had a majority of votes were voted to be 
the word of God." 

The New Testament, then, according to this new 
school, is " a selection of the classical writings of 
original Christianity, enclosed by movable boundaries, 
and arose throughout the century extending from 
about A. D. 53 onwards." 3 It is an organic part of 
the religious literature of the first two centuries, differ- 
ing from other parts only in a degree of excellence, and 
only to be understood by a study of all the surround- 
ing works. Now, it is plain to every thinking man, 
that we have here to do with a vast array of facts, or 

1 Hist, of European Morals, Vol. I., p. 363 — note. 

2 Age of Reason, p. 7. 

3 Holtzmann, R. u. p., p. 18. Hilgenfeld, Der Kanon, s. 67. 



30 PATH OF ENQUIRY. 

supposed facts, and with a view of Scripture built 
upon them, which, if true, must largely change our 
mode of teaching and obeying that which we call the 
word of God. The path of this enquiry is strictly 
historic. It runs through the Apocryphal New Testa- 
ment, the Apostolic Fathers, the Clementines, the 
works of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and the 
Alexandrian school, — for from all these plausible argu- 
ments are drawn in proof of the new theory of the 
canon. It leads into the views of Marcion, Gnosticism, 
Montanism, and the Passover controversy — all of 
which, we are told, indicate the late origin of the con- 
tested books. No century in the history of the church 
is so obscure as that succeeding the apostolic. 1 Only 
the acuteness of modern historic science, we are as- 
sured, has enabled us to discern the truth amid the 
blended shadows of ignorance and credulity. If these 
things are so, it is certainly a very simple and honest 
conclusion that the Christian student, who will pro- 
nounce for or against the results reached by such 
investigations, should, in common decency, make him- 
self master of the facts adduced, and learn to weigh 
the evidence offered in the balance of historic enlight- 
enment. The church cannot, and dare not, be ignor- 
ant or silent over her own past, whence weapons are 
being drawn that may slay her future. When scien- 
tific research and blatant unbelief unite to proclaim the 
Scriptures unhistoric — and that in tones so loud that 
they are heard to-day in remote country parishes — it 
will not do to cry, in startled rhetoric, " procul pro- 
fani" and declare, by short and easy faith, that the 
word of the Lord abideth forever. No amount of 

1 Cf. Stanley, Eastern Church, p. 39. 



THEORIES OF HISTORY. 3 1 

philosophic acumen, or keen orthodoxy, or pulpit elo- 
quence, or appeals to experience, will answer what 
claims to be historic testimony. All such attempts 
are but fighting darkness with a broom. We must 
know whereof we affirm, and be able to give an 
answer based on facts to every man that asks a reason 
for the faith that is in us. 



II. 

But, turning to another relation of our subject, it 
seems especially necessary at the present day that 
religious history should be carefully studied in view of 
the materialistic, rationalistic and speculative theories 
which do not hesitate in the light of the nineteenth 
century to claim the whole being and history of man 
for their respective domains. The lowest of these is 
the teaching of the present-day scientists — a kind of 
Ishmaelites — whose creed usually runs, "there is no 
god but matter, and Darwin is his prophet." With 
marvellous skill and patience they have weighed the 
mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance; they 
have calculated forces, formulated equivalents, con- 
served and transmuted energy, wrested secret after 
secret from the grasp of nature ; and, under the guid- 
ance of experiment and observation, reduced the most 
complicated physical phenomena to the reign of law. 
But beyond the universe of matter seems to lie a 
world of mind ; could not this be conquered by the 
same triumphant method ? May not the intricate facts 
of consciousness — thought, emotion, purpose, worship 
— be reduced to law, and expressed by a mathematical 
formula? This the modern scientist is ready to affirm. 



32 MATERIALISTIC DEVELOPMENT. 

Roger Bacon said to his pupil " Tu meliores radices 
egeris" 1 (you will strike root deeper, and bear fruit 
higher than I). That, we are told, was a significantly 
prophetic remark. Man has advanced through the 
periods pointed out by Comte — those of fetishism, 
metaphysics, and monotheism — to the full liberty of 
the children of science. God has been eliminated 
from the problem, as Ruskin says, because he has not 
been found in a bottle anywhere. History, we are 
informed, shows that the advance of mankind has 
always been over the graves of deities. Virchow 
says, 2 "We have the office to morally free the people.'' 
Haeckel declares, " Our century forms, through the 
discovery of the origin of man, the most important 
and glorious turning-point in the whole history of the 
development of humanity."' 

And all this, we are assured, is not accidental, but 
is a part of nature's results under the law of history. 
Buckle maintains that Shakspere was just as necessa- 
ry a product of his time as a corn-cob is of the Sum- 
mer sun. Herbert Spencer has written a history of 
Ethics to show that morals is a physical product, de- 
veloped in time under the law of animal pleasure and 
heredity. Conscience is simply the result in us of 
certain nervous modifications produced from agreeable 
experiences of past generations inclining us to do 
what is pleasant. 3 Kant's Categorical Imperative is 
nothing but a shiver in the brain — the fruit of a fore- 
father's fear, and all morals form a branch of physio- 
logical mathematics. The pleasant is always the good ? 
the painful is always the evil. The supreme law of 

1 Quoted in Gold. Smith's " Study of History" p. 39. 
3 Rede 29, Sep. 1865. 3 Data of Ethics, p. 123. 






MATERIALISTIC DEVELOPMENT. 33 

history is selfishness. Might is always right. The 
survivor, whether Nero or the Devil, is always the 
fittest, and the only gospel of the race is that of evo- 
lutionistic hedonism. The school of Necessarians 
make free will in history an illusion. It is at least no 
more mysterious a contrast to the physical law of the 
universe than to the sovereign will of God. Man is, 
in fact, an automaton. Mind is a product of the brain; 
emotion is a certain movement of the nerve centre; 
religion may be traced to the liver; and poetry is a 
product of the smaller intestines. The whole of man 
— as individul and race — is claimed as a development 
to be explained only by Natural Science. History is 
as much a physical growth as a cabbage, and when 
Horace compared humanity to a forest and the suc- 
cessive generations to the falling leaves, he was most 
prosaically and scientifically correct. Lofty ideas 
about Providence, prayer, the miraculous and the 
divine are- mere poetic personifications born from the 
course of nature and the fond wishes of men. 

What works through these facts and laws we do 
not know. We hear much of a nisus formatives, a 
Bildungstrieb, a something in flowers and clouds and 
man, which builds teleologically and well; but the 
radii of this mysterious quiddity never transcend 
the horizon of the material, and the stream of 
human history, with its dash of purposes and ceaseless 
fret and foam of volition against the iron edge of the 
centuries, must not be regarded as essentially differ- 
ent from the muddy movement of the Mississippi 
which bears the mire and dirt of a continent to the 
troubled sea. Such a view of human life, whether 
materialistic or pantheistic, Spinoza frankly admits 



34 TRUE VIEW OF HISTORY. 

makes all idea of aim and plan and goal in history 
impossible, and resolves all into a blind ebb and flow 
movement of the life of the world. 1 This, then, is 
the final word of advanced thought, "The popular re- 
ligion has entered on its last phase," and the school of 
modern theologians seeking to bring the creeds into 
harmony with science are just Plotinus and Porphyry of 
old fighting in the red light of a setting sun in behalf 
of an outlived faith. 

It is beside our purpose to reply to the erroneous 
views adduced in illustration of the necessity of his- 
toric research, but we may notice in passing the out- 
line of a better, because necessary, line of thought. 
Tour points seem important to be urged in a full view 
of history, and receive proper attention only in a 
religious treatment, i . The highest end of history is the 
history of humanity. This is based on the unity and 
brotherhood of the race — a point only clearly and 
(emphatically taught by Christianity. 2. A world-his- 
tory cannot be understood without a world govern- 
ment 2 — this, also, Christianity has taught mankind in 
its God over all blessed forever. 3. A history to be 
philosophic and complete must deal with sin and sal- 
vation, for these are phenomena called forth by all 
human life. Here, too, Christianity stands alone in 
claiming to offer perfect faith and hope. And, 4., a 
satisfactory view of history must leave place for freest 
individual effort and activity. The three great themes 
of every independent mind, viz., God, free will and 
immortality are blasted by the breath of materialism, 
but in the history of the Christian church find health- 
iest stimulus to fullest development. 

1 Cf. Eiehm. Religion und Wissenschaft, 1881, p. 13. 

2 W. Von Humboldt, in Riehm, R. u. W. S., 11. 



COMPARATIVE RELIGION. 35 

Another phase of thought prevalent in our day 
makes the study of church history especially impera- 
tive. I refer to the great prominence given to the 
history and comparative treatment of different relig- 
ions. The sacred books of the East have been pub- 
lished, missionaries from all lands furnish illustrative 
data, and the science of comparative religion is claim- 
ing a place in the classification of studies. The fun- 
damental principle underlying all this department of 
thought is, that religion is a unity based on the nature 
of man and manifesting in all its historic forms the 
same essential features. Renan says lm . " An absolute 
revelation of truth is contained in no human religion; 
the aim rather of each is according to its excellence to 
make man, as far as possible, happy here upon earth." 
Christianity accordingly is but the purest manifestation 
of what the Hegelian school calls the Absolute Re- 
ligion, and excels the others only in leading its follow- 
ers by a shorter and plainer road to that paradise 
where Socrates and Mahomet, the Calmet Tartar 
and the cannibal from the Pacific will sit down together 
with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In other words, we 
have the Neo-Platonism of the third century revived, 
with the slight addition that vulgar sincerity is put on 
a par with devout culture. The very nature of relig- 
ion is apprehension of the infinite, 2 hence the name, 
the idea and worship of God are fluctuating and indif- 
ferent. Religious conceptions are the natural product 
of the exercise of man's senses upon the physical 
world about him. The loftiest idea of the infinite, 
virtue, law, immortality, 3 and the sacred words faith 
and revelation, are an irresistible growth of man's un^ 

1 London lectures, 1880. Lee. IV. 
2 Max Milller, The origin and growth of religion,^. 2. 3 lb., p. 362. 



36 CHRISTIANITY WHAT. 

aided powers of observation and generalization. 

In broad contrast to all this the Christian principle 
proclaims itself as the Absolute, resting upon a reve- 
lation in Christ, and guided unto all truth by the Spirit 
of wisdom and of knowledge and of a sound mind. 
The church has from the beginning declined all com- 
promise with mere natural religion. A torn and bleed- 
ing fugitive, she has refused to enter the Lararium of 
Alexander Severus or accept the hospitality of the 
mosque of Omar. The God she worships is not one 
spirit among many — an individual of a genus; 1 neith 
er is our religion one among many, or the Christian 
sanctuary coordinate with Druid circle or Hindoo tem- 
ple. The church is not the favorite bride in an orient- 
al harem, she is the Lamb's wife, the sole object of 
his saving regard, the sole possessor of his will and 
covenant. Church 4 history is, therefore, in an import- 
ant sense much more than a branch of religious his- 
tory. It is the history of religion, the only record of 
the foundation and growth of God's kingdom on earth. 
By all the holy instinct of its origin; by the uncom- 
promising nature of truth, by the blood stained story 
of martyrs and confessors is church history com- 
pelled to protest against the attempt to reduce Christ- 
ianity to a mere natural creed. The modern science 
of religion is quite ready to yield it the first place 
among religions, and then proceed to show how it has 
attained this preeminence as the last step in develop- 
ment from a low state of irreligion or fetishism. But 
a careful study of the history of religion shows this 
assumption to be unproven. The Greeks described 
Clio — the muse of history — as the daughter of Mnem- 

1 Cf. Delitzsch. System der Chvl. Apologetik. Thl. 7, § I. 



CHRISTIANITY TRUE UNITY. 7>7 

osune (memory) and Zeus, the living one, (from Zaoo) 
i. e. the story of humanity when properly told implies 
an union of heaven and earth — of God and man. 
Such a myth utters a prophetic impulse of the human 
heart, which finds its realization only in the history of 
the kingdom of God in Christ. Here alone do the 
seen and unseen, the finite and the infinite find a har- 
monious relation, for the very life of Christianity is 
Jesus Christ, a divine and human Saviour, and the his- 
tory of the church is the fulfilment of his promise, 
" Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
world." One or other of these sides of the true re- 
ligion has been emphasized by the great natural re- 
ligions, but because both were not united as soul and 
body there was no life, no organic development. 

Brahminism unfolded the loftiest ideas in regard to 
God. In his awful, impenetrable infinity, like wavelets 
lost in ocean, sink all finite things. The last thought 
of the dying Hindoo, forgetting earth and sense, is 
to drop into the abyss of a dreamless Nirvana with 
the word Brahm upon his stiffening lips. Max Miiller 
has tried to show x how the ancient Hindoos speculated 
from nature to henotheism and polytheism, and thence 
to monotheism, which led through atheism and doubt 
to a pantheism cold, mystic and ascetic. But he does 
not explain why that system so poetic and philosophic 
has rested unprogressive and dead for two thousand 
years like a royal mummy in the pyramid of Cheops. 
Brahminism has made no advance; and it is to-day no 
nearer the catholic humanity and infinite pitifulness of 
Christianity than it was twenty centuries ago when 
Guatama arose to preach Buddhism to hearts that 

1 lb., p. 245f. 



38 RELIGION OF CHINA. 

were hungering amid pantheistic abstractions. 

The ancient faith of China, on the other hand, lays 
great stress upon the personal in religion. Its tradi- 
tional creed is an adoration of the human. It has a 
belief in one God who is worshipped twice a year by 
the emperor for the nation; but the hearts of the peo- 
ple pray to their ancestors, and the thought of the 
infinite is almost absent from the national conscious- 
ness. 1 ; Here, also, has religion failed to maintain its 
balance and sunk into the ground. But not merely do 
these ancient systems show no power to rise into 
Christianity, they manifest further an inevitable pro- 
cess of perversion and decay. Prof. Legge says: 2 
"The religion of the ancient Chinese was a monothe- 
ism," and it was only through long centuries that it was 
affected " by a nature worship on the one hand and by 
a system of superstitious divination on the other." 3 
Max Miiller has shown that the prevalent idea that all 
religion began in fetishism is utterly untenable. 4 In 
the early dawn of every nation we catch glimpses of a 
paradise, and hear broken voices telling of commun- 
ion with God in the fellowship of truth. The history 
of all religions is a story of error, superstition, priest- 
craft and corruption. The human element in Christ- 
ianity is no exception to this change and decay in 
religion; but, unlike other religions, it possesses a 
divine element as part of its very being, through 
which it has the power of reform, and the ability to 
rise from its sloth and sin, and go forth again the mes- 
senger of life to men. M. Miiller finds 5 only three 
historic missionary religions, viz., Buddhism, Mo- 

1 Cf. Wordsworth. Bampton Lectures, 1881. " The one religion." p. 58. 

2 The relig. of China, p. 11. 3 p. 16. 

4 O. and gr. of Rel. p. 50 ff. 5 Lecture on Missions, 1874. 



THREE MISSIONARY RELIGIONS. 39 

hammetanism and Christianity. These alone have 
shown the power to overleap boundaries of race and 
clime, and with an enthusiastic propagandism go forth 
to convert the nations. The days of comparison, 
however, are now past and the day of contrast has 
come. Buddha prophesied that in five thousand years 
his relics would be burnt up and all knowledge of his. 
doctrines would disappear from off the earth. 1 The 
testimony of close observers is, that his prophecy is 
approaching fulfilment. 2 Islam, which began in teach- 
ing drawn from the Bible and flourished most in con- 
tact with Christian nations 3 is now represented by 
" the sick man " among the kingdoms and the crescent 
is waning in the eastern sky. 

No fact of modern history is more certain than that 
Christianity now stands alone as the one missionary 
religion of earth. In common with its two great 
rivals it has known decline and has had its dark ages, 
but, unlike every other faith, it has ever shown the 
power of self-restoration, the capacity to profit by all 
that science and philosophy, and other creeds, and the 
ever unfolding experience of man have to offer, the 
spiritual instinct to absorb truth from all sources and 
yet not lose its identity or be turned aside from its 
lofty mission for the Most High upon earth. 

As we have observed the presence of the Divine in 
the church, that which separates Christianity from all 
creeds of earth and makes it the absolute religion, is 
Jesus Christ — a divine, human Saviour and life. The 
man who holds this in his heart is religious and Christ- 

1 Wordsworth B. L., p. 275. 

2 Of. Isaac Taylors' " Saturday Evening." 

3 Cf. G. Smith. " Lect. on Study of Hist., p. 121f. 



40 A TEST DOCTRINE. 

ian, the man who rejects this is irreligious and not 
Christian. 

This is a doctrine not only necessary in the logic of 
the Christian system, but stands through the history 
of the church as a sine qua non of activity and growth. 
Ebionites, Sabellians, Arians, Socinians, Unitarians, 
have produced men of great ability, earnestness and 
zeal, but they laid irreverent hands upon this essential 
principle and, despite all their intelligence and moral- 
ity, they have never lived and taken root and leavened 
the earth. They form a moral society, but never make 
church history. 1 They exist as a philosophic sect — a 
company of sociable philanthropists — but their suste- 
nance is parasitic, and their extinction a matter of 
time. On the other hand, the man or church that 
holds Jesus Christ as the divine human redeemer is 
Christian, and will live. 2 The Greek Church and the 
Church of Rome appear in the light of history grow- 
ingly corrupt, in many respects far beneath the sects 
which they condemned for blaspheming Christ; but 
they held the head, even the God-man, and they have 
lived and will live. They possess amid much error 
the secret of the Lord, and from their midst there can 
ever arise a Chrysostom, a Wyckliffe, a Luther, to re- 
form the church in the power of this great historic 
truth. 

Advancing another step, we are brought to notice 
the importance of the study of church history in view 
of the claims of the so-called New Theology of our 
time. 

Much is made here of the doctrine of development, 

1 I believe the Unitarians of this country have one missionary, a Mr. 

Dale in India. 
12 Cf. The development of this idea in Delitzsch, Apologetik. 



THE NEW THEOLOGY. 4 1 

and certainly this is an important truth for whose illus- 
tration in our day we should never cease to be thank- 
ful. The thought of God's church, i. e., its doctrine 
has come to consciousness in history in a certain order, 
and rooted in a divine revelation. In the Old Testa- 
ment this can be traced in the long course of the rev- 
elation itself, the prophecies and poetic books being like 
an unfolding of the law. The only true theology of 
the Old Testament is that which moves in a great his- 
toric development. But the New Testament being 
given within a single generation does not show so 
much its development in itself, that is to be sought 
rather in the history of the church through the subse- 
quent ages. 

The Greek church still in possession of the subtlety 
and critical acumen of Athens and Alexandria dis- 
cussed and formulated the teachings of Scripture and 
necessary thought on the person of God the Saviour. 
(Theology proper.) The Latin Church, with its Ro- 
man eye fixed on practical life and every-day needs, 
examined with legal mind and expressed in clear 
judicial terminology the doctrine concerning the sinner. 
(Anthropology.) Then arose the Germanic Church, 
which, confessing the Greek creed concerning the 
Saviour and the Latin creed concerning the sinner, was 
called to teach as never before the great truth of jus- 
tification by faith — that cardinal doctrine by which sin 
and Saviour are exhibited in their proper relations to 
one another and to God. 1 (Soteriology.) Within 
these great outlines there can be traced a church 
growth in wisdom and in knowledge along all the 
courses of thought and activity. This development* 

1 Cf. Kliefoth. Dogmengeschichte. 



42 DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE. 

however, is of truth from truth. It is a clearer appre- 
hension of Scripture teaching in the light of more 
facts, a more logical treatment and a more historical 
setting forth of its contents. No step in such progress 
brings us into conflict with the positive results of the 
past. Paul's doctrine of sin can never become Hegel's 
idea of unripeness, nor the New Testament view of 
the death of Christ become the legitimate parent of 
the Schleiermacherian theory of the atonement. In 
other words, true development must include the funda- 
mental facts and doctrines of primitive Christianity in 
all their sharp objectivity and can never be merged 
into what the new theology calls the growth of the 
idea. On the other hand, legitimate growth of dogma 
excludes all parasitic enlargements, or "corruption by 
excess." The grand defect in Newman's well-known 
essay on the development of Christian doctrine lies 
in regarding all movement as growth, and all that does 
not positively conflict with the idea as its lawful se- 
quence. 1 We thus get the doctrine of perpetual reve- 
lation in the form of so-called development. What- 
ever views prevail in the church are true, and we are 
led by another path to the " survival of the fittest" — 
which may simply be the right of might. But to gain 
an approximate idea of the results reached through 
development by the new school whose disciples claim 
to be nar egox?)v champions of historic theology, I 
give an outline of their teaching as set forth to-day in 
Germany and elsewhere. They teach, (i) a rational- 
istic view of the universe which subserves all under 
law, order and the impossibility of the miraculous. 2 

1 Cf. Mozley. " Theory of Development." p. 31, ff. 

2 Schwartz. Zur geschichte der neuesten theologie. Vierte aufl., 1869, 

p. 586 f. Also, in general, Holsten, " Die Prot. Kirche u, die theoh 
Wissenschaft" 1881. 



REVELATION AND INSPIRATION. 43 

(2) The Bible is nava '"Oeia nai avdpGcniva navra — for 
us arid our study a product of human mental activity. 3 
With Luther, we must distinguish between the Bible 
and the Word of God— the latter is found in the for- 
mer, but they are by no means coterminous. The 
Scriptures are the classical sources of our religious 
teaching, but differ in no respect in kind from the 
historic literature of any other period of church history, 
(e. g., I Maccabees, Jesus Sirach, and the extra-canon- 
ical New Testament literature are for historic purposes 
just as valuable as the so-called Bible itself.) 4 Christ- 
ianity is not a revelation or gift of God any more than 
conscience or parental love. Jesus among men and 
the Bible among books are pure, natural products 
under the divine law of the universe and history. 

(3) Inspiration is a creation of theologians. 1 The 
early church claimed no such special importance for the 
sacred writings, or held that the inspiration of Apos- 
tles differed only in degree from that of all Christians. 2 
Since the Bible is just the best expression of the 
highest religious experience, it is only in a poetic way 
that it can be called inspired or a revelation. "To 
profit fully by the New Testament," says Matt. Arnold, 3 
"the first thing to be done is to make it perfectly clear 
to one's self that its reporters both could err and did 
err." 

(4) The proprium of the Protestant church is not an 
infallible theological system of doctrine, but solely a 
particular kind of inner religious life. The position 

2 A favorite phrase of Hamann. 

3 Bie " Eidbruchigkeit" unserer neukirchl. geistlichen. Kiel, 1881. 

4 Holtzmann S. 17. 

1 Holsten — Thesis 15. 

2 Cheyne- Sermon. " The Christian point of view in the study of the 

Bible," 1879, p. 9. 3 " Literature and Bog ma," p. 131. 



44 HISTORIC PROTESTANTISM. 

of Schleiermacher is adopted and religion made a feel- 
ing of dependence centered in the disposition (Gemiith). 
Dogma is ever changing, and mutability of theological 
views lies in the very nature of every religion. With 
increasing knowledge the creed must be constantly 
readjusted. And yet " our religious faith has remained 
the same as that of the Reformers though our scien- 
tific theological foundation for it has become essen- 
tially another." * History shows that theological 
dogma never was and never can be the ground of 
unity in the Protestant church. As it is the work of 
science to sift truth from imperfect historical state- 
ments, so it is the duty of scientific theology to find 
the kernel of truth in the old doctrinal forms of 
Christianity. This is the only path of progress to- 
wards perfection. 

(5) The trinity is a theological figment — or at best 
a historic illustration of modes of religious manifesta- 
tion. 

(6) Jesus was not divine. His godhead sprang 
solely from the mistaken affection of his early follow- 
ers. He is our Redeemer in the sense that he was 
the first and only revealer of the only true religious 
principle for mankind. He felt himself God's son 
only in holy communion with the Father and in this 
spiritualized sense he regarded himself as the Mes- 
siah. 2 He was not sinless. (Schenkel, Keim.) 

(7) Men are justified by faith in the grace of God, 3 
and not as the Jews thought by the works of the law. 
The sacrificial phraseology of Paul is but a theological 
coloring from the schools of the Pharisees and does 

1 Eidbricchigkeit. S. 68. 2 lb. S. 61. 

3 lb., S. 36 f. 



PAULINE ACCOMMODATION. 45 

not belong to the doctrine itself. Through grace God 
imputes a man's faith to him for righteousness. Paul 
sets this forth in the form of a sacrificial death of 
Christ — a form borrowed from Jewish customs, and 
which was simply a mode of teaching fitted to lead 
from the narrowness of Judaism to the Christian doc- 
trine of grace, by means of figurative phraseology 
taken from the law. But the doctrine of justification 
by faith is quite independent of such a view. Paul 
emphasizes grace in such a way as to exclude any 
judicial notion. 1 The relation of God and man in 
justification is that of father and child — a relation 
which includes only love, trust and a sweet feeling of 
dependence. In fact, it is said 2 that no prominent 
German theologian, except Delitzsch and Ebrard, 
holds a vicarious substitution in the atonement. 

(8) Religion and morality are not twain, as the old 
theology teaches, but one, as Kant teaches. Or as 
M. Arnold says 3 " Religion is morality touched by 
emotion." 

(9) The eschatology of the new theology is univer- 
salist and j estorationist — though the whole question of 
immortality is usually relegated to the region of the 
adiaphora. 4 

The residuum of orthodoxy which cannot be ex- 
plained by this semi-mythical method of objectionizing 
the subjective into history, may be found, we are told, 
in the accretions which have come to the primitive 
creed from heathen culture or the mistaken notions of 
theologians. The mechanical view of inspiration — a 

1 lb., S. 39. 

2 Matheson, Aids to the study of German Theology, 2d Ed., 1876, p. 70. 

3 L. andD.. p. 46. 

4 Cf. G. Dreydorf. Deutsch-Evang. Blatter. Marz, 1882, p. 187. 



46 ACCRETIONS TO THE CREED. 

thing unknown to the Jews in the Old Testament, and 
unclaimed by the New Testament for itself — is, it is 
said, borrowed from the later Cabbala and Greek 
heathenism. 1 We are told that the rival Christian and 
Platonic schools in Alexandria greatly influenced each 
other, and that as the philosopher must notice how 
neo-platonism was tinged by Christian teaching, so 
must the church historian admit that Christianity 
borrowed not a little from the latest academy. Theo- 
logical subtleties on the nature of the Godhead be- 
came largely a substitute for decaying Platonism. The 
Abyssinian church, it is said, still grows metaphysical 
over seventy different theories of the union of the two 
natures in Christ. 2 

The trinity' is declared to be an echo of pre-chris 
tian thought, influenced afterwards by the philosophic 
trinity of the neo-platonists and not reaching its pres- 
ent form till A. D. 381 at the council of Constantino- 
ple. Such a dreadful doctrine as total depravity can 
be historically explained, it is held, from the gloomy 
remarks of Paul over his former wicked life, taken up 
by Augustine, a converted libertine, and framed into 
a church dogma as applicable to all men. 3 We are 
pointed, further, to the Greek church, which has stood 
still for a thousand years, and in its rejection of the 
filioque in the creed, its three-fold immersion at bap- 
tism, its administering confirmation and the Lord's 
supper to infants, the almost total absence of the idea 
of substitution in the work of Christ, 4 not to speak of 
its rejection of purgatory, invocation of saints and the 

Cf. Holsten, S. 22. Philo made the 6 inspired. 

2 Stanley, Eastern Church, p. 110. 

3 Farley, Unitarianism defined, p. 156 f. 

4 Cf. Stanley, p. 138. ...... .... 



THE PERSON OF CHRIST. 47 

papacy, perplexes not a little both Protestant and 
Romanist. The theology of the Reformation has 
grown, we are told, 1 from "the logical and legal ele- 
ments in the West," "Forensic justification," "merit" and 
"demerit," "satisfaction," "imputed righteousness," 
"decrees;" federal headship, &c, are ideas almost un- 
known in the East, and are therefore a late growth in 
theology. 

One point of paramount interest ever arises in this 
discussion about the historic, viz: the person of Christ 
and his miraculous life. Strauss and Baur, both disci- 
ples of Hegel, and consequently ready to sacrifice 
facts of history which conflict with the idea, found the 
so-called divine Christ nothing but the product of the 
thought of the early church. Martineau has sunk to 
the same plane, and says: 2 "From the person of 
Jesus everything official attached to him by evangel- 
ists and divines has fallen away: when they put such 
false robes upon Him they were, i. e. the evangelists 
were, but leading Him to death. The pomp of royal 
lineage and fulfilled prediction, the prerogatives of 
king, of priest, of judge, the advent with retinue of 
angels on the clouds of Heaven, are to us mere de- 
forming investitures." The old rationalism against 
which Butler wrote his Analogy is now little heard of. 
The new rationalism adopts Butler's book and declares 
it perfectly true that man has by nature religious in- 
stincts. 3 The fulness of times of which Christian 
writers speak is accepted by these new theologians. 
The Jews looked for a Messiah. The classic religions 
were dying or dead. Philosophy . had run its course. 

1 j&.,p. 111. 

2 Losses in recent Theology, 1881. 

3 Cf. Matheson, p. 140 f. . . ■. 



48 PSEUDO BIOGRAPHY. 

and humanity drifted doubting and confused over a 
troubled sea. It was just the time for something new 
and Christianity is just the natural product of such 
circumstances. The first century with its fantastic 
imaginings, the air full of astrology and magic and 
oriental mysteries was just the age when men put their 
reveries in the shape of fictitious history. "Chris- 
tianity," we are taught, 1 "floated into the Roman empire 
on the wave of credulity that brought with it a long 
train of oriental superstitions and legends." We are 
pointed 2 to the pseudo lives of Pythagoras, Plotinus, 
Apollonius of Tyana, and the Clementines, and told 
that the gospel life of Christ is just the fantastic story 
of a noble teacher in whose person loving followers 
put historically that union of the divine and human 
after which every religious soul longs in spirit. Bruno 
Bauer declares that Christianity is just a historic 
setting forth of the disgust and despair of expiring an- 
tiquity, as Hegel taught that the kingdom of heaven 
in Christ was but a spiritualization of the Roman state 
in the Emperor — a pure soul teleology blossoming 
from the grave of a defunct political aim. F. Baur 
can tell how this picture grew into its present divine 
outlines between A. D. 50 and 150. The Petrine 
theology shows us the prophet of God; the Pauline 
adds the Greek idea of God revealing himself by 
communicating himself; then, in the middle of the 
second century, arose the Johannine doctrine betraying 
the influence of Philo, and which blended the views of 
perfect humanity and perfect godhead into the unity 
of his person. The new theology makes Jesus but a 

1 Lecky, Hist, of European Morals, Vol. I, p. 397. 

2 Renan, Vie de Jesus. 



THE HISTORIC CHRIST. 49 

lofty, though not sinless, illustration of true commun- 
ion with God the universal Father. We thus find three 
representations of Jesus in modern theology. Strauss 
says in his latest work: 1 "The facts of his life are 
such that it is partly certain they did not happen, part- 
ly uncertain whether they did happen, and least of all 
beyond doubt that they did happen" — in other words 
he is a myth. The Tubingen critics make Jesus a pro- 
duct of the union of Petrine and Pauline theology — 
in other words an idea. The newest school strips off 
both myths and ideas, and makes him a teacher and 
guide to God — in other words a mere man. 

•'Why? " it is asked, " should we all agree to reject 
the fabulous and marvellous in the life of Simon Magus 
as given in the Clementine Homilies and early fathers, 
and yet accept the character of Christ with all the 
legents put upon it by the same fathers " ? Now, it is 
plain that the only method of defence here must begin 
with historic investigation. The fulcrum on which 
Baur rested his critical lever was the Clementine writ- 
ings, therefore, the first step in examining his theory 
must be a careful perusal of this apocryphal work. 
The character of Christ the \6yo$ is borrowed — it is 
asserted — from Philo. Then the man who will under- 
stand Christ must read Philo. Justin Martyr, who 
travelled from East to West, does not speak of Jesus 
as a Redeemer, but as Hoards vo/aoOzt??? simply — if so, 
we must study Justin the more carefully. The early 
heathen critics, Lucian and Porphyry, maintained 
against the first Christians that they made Jesus a 
god — a thing he himself never taught; if this be so, 
we must calmly and critically read what these men 

1 Der alte und der neue Glaube. 



50 MIRACLES. 

have written because fas est et ab hoste doceri. In a 
word, we are told from Hebrew, Greek and Latin that 
the character of the Lord we worship cannot stand 
the fierce light that beats upon it from history; then 
before we begin to reply we must read in Hebrew, 
Greek and Latin what history has to tell us as well as 
our adversaries on this cardinal article of our faith. 

With regard to the miracles which form so essential 
an element in the character of Christ, the new school 
are equally confident. The great Schleiermacher ad- 
mitted at least two miracles, the creation of man and 
the person of Christ; but our present day divines have 
outgrown their master, and declare miracles inadmis- 
sible—philosophically, religiously and historically. 
They are inadmissible philosophically because the 
modern almanac has no column for the miraculous; 
they are inadmissible religiously because Keim says: 1 
" We are to make our faith in the crucified one 
independent of his miracles;" and history condemns 
them by showing (i) that they belong to all mythol- 
ogy; (2) that the first century was wonderfully predis- 
posed towards the marvellous; (3) that Tacitus 2 and 
Suetonius 3 give a clear account of the Emperor Ves- 
pasian's restoring a blind man to sight by spitting on 
his eyes, and healing the lame — yet who believes such 
stories? — and (4) that the miraculous in history forms 
a complete series. 4 The gospels narrate it of Christ; 
the Acts, of Peter and Paul; Irenaeus, of the saints; 
Origen, of the Church; St. Patrick, of himself; the 
mediaeval chroniclers, of St. Bernhard; and all priests, 

1 Geschichtl. Christus S. 119. 

2 Hist. IV. 8. 3 Vesp. 7. 

4 Cf, "The mythical element in the N. Test," by F. H. Hedge, in 
"Christianity and mod. thought," 1872, p. 166 f. 



METHOD OF STUDY. 5 1 

of Loyola, Xavier and every saint in the calendar. 
From the second and third century on the church is 
described, according to the law of history, as a sacred 
human growth under the guidance of the Spirit of 
God. " So," the new theology demands, "treat the 
first century. Make it purely historic and, stripping 
off both the mystic and the mythic, give us a sure sci- 
entific and historic standing ground on which to fight 
hostile science and antagonistic culture." Here his- 
tory throws us into the toils of an inescapable Sorites. 
How much of this is true, and how much erroneous, 
can be answered only by careful and prayerful study 
of the past of man and the church. 

III. 

But we must turn for a moment to the very practi- 
cal question of the right method of studying history, 
and the benefits of such a method. We might here 
undertake to illustrate the three fundamental laws of 
Church History, viz. : that of objectivity, or a faithful 
statement of facts; that of the pragmatic principle, by 
which the logic of events is set forth; and, finally, the 
canon of theological investigation, which requires 
catholicity without indifference, faith without credulity, 
and religious sympathy without party prejudice. In- 
stead, however, I desire, in closing, to urge the great 
necessity of a study of the sources of history. The 
system of teaching by text-books gives elementary in- 
formation, very often quite comprehensive, but usually 
affords little stimulus to further research; and lectures, 
however carefully composed, cannot give the vivid 
touches, the direct impression, the indescribable sense 



52 CLASSICAL EDUCATION NECESSARY. 

of nearness which comes from reading a work of the 
period studied, from putting one's ear to the mouth of 
the Past and hearing its varied accents in its own 
mother tongue. Here a teacher can do his very best 
work, if time and the requisite prequalification on the 
part of students can be obtained, in leading inquiring 
minds to dig for themselves among the roots of antiq- 
uity, and so, perhaps amid creative joy, help to his- 
toric blossom some important truth. To do this, our 
students should be able to read patristic Greek and 
Latin with some degree of ease. 

As a matter of mental discipline, nothing can take 
the place of a classical education. 

The University of Berlin, after a ten years' trial of 
the contrary, has just decided unanimously, on motion 
of a Professor of History, seconded by a Professor of 
Mathematics, that the only satisfactory preliminary 
training for students of all departments must include 
the Humanities. For the student of Church History, 
such a training is both indirectly and directly indis- 
pensable. The biography of the Church, since it left 
Jerusalem, has been written in Greek and Latin, and 
he who would really understand it, should hear the 
early witnesses in the tongue wherein they were born. 
Doctrinal discussions are almost inseparable from 
the language in which they arise. The questions of 
6/Aoovffiov or 6fjowvGLov 7 eB, ovk ovroDVy OsoTOHoZ, or Pat- 
ripassianism, the hypostatic in God or the trichotomic 
in man, etc., receive their full illustration only in the 
light of their original nomenclature. 

I speak hesitatingly, but the American. Church 
seems to me here to occupy a back place. To every 
Romish priest the Latin treasure house lies open. The 



GERMAN METHOD. 53 

Greek priest can read history from Eusebius to Anna 
Commena in his own mother tongue. In Britain, 
scores of well-qualified students annually enter the 
church able to consult with ease the sources of history. 
The boys who leave Eton have read twice as much 
classics as our ordinary college graduates, and studied 
more of the Greek Testament than is overtaken in 
many of our seminary courses. A friend of mine — 
the senior classic at Cambridge in 1880 — had read, by 
his twenty-second year, all the Greek and Latin in ex- 
istence down to the age of brass. Theological stu- 
dents in Germany must pass their examinations in 
Latin, and having spent four hours a day, six days in 
the week, for eight or ten years, over the classics, are 
ready, at the invitation of Church History, to enter 
with zest upon a new field of ancient research. This 
German system of historic study aims at promoting 
original investigation. One great stimulus to such 
research is the private society held by the Professor, 
at which students, who wish to excel, study with him 
some source, and seek to discover about some person, 
place or thing, all that is possible to mortal man. e.g. 
The first year I was in Leipzig, Prof. Harnack 
took up Muratori's Fragment, examined the fac simile 
text, discussed the strange readings, conjectured to fill 
lacunae, and investigated everything that could shed 
light on this important witness to the New Testament 
Canon. Another young Professor, a friend of mine, 
read, with his private class, Minucius Felix' beautiful 
apology, Octavius. I have spent an evening a week, 
winter after winter, in such a society with Prof. De- 
litzsch, Hebrew bible in hand, tracing critically historic 
growth in the sources of the Old Testament, with con- 



54 HISTORIC CERTAINTY. 

stant reference to the radical assaults of the Reuss- 
Graf-Wellhausen school. 

Thus to get a view of the whole range of thought 
some one peak is climbed with patient toil to the very 
summit, whence the student can see things in a light 
and relation he would scarcely have thought of by 
simply measuring with ecclesiastical theodolite from 
the valley below. 

Such methods of study make the young minister 
continue historic research. A clergyman of my ac- 
quaintance, near Tubingen, has thus become an autho- 
rity on the history of the Jews. Another, whom I 
met in Miihlberg, was making Clement of Alexandria 
a special study, expecting to write a book on the 
ethical system of that father. . Thus, strange to say, 
some of the most learned works in Germany are writ- 
ten by country pastors; who, after the thorough start 
of the University, use their leisure to produce a book 
of permanent value. Such thoroughness in student 
life enables the reading minister to speak with author- 
ity in controversies which constantly draw their weap- 
ons from historic arsenals. Since the time of Niebuhr 
dogmatic ideas concerning history have gradually 
passed away, till now the other extreme seems in 
sight, and the past has sunk to the region of the prob- 
able. Holtzmann says 1 "History can no longer be 
believed as we believe in God, or known as we know 
logic, or constructed with certainty as we frame a 
mathematical system; but all real historic knowledge 
rests upon the modest art of ascertaining the highest 
degree of probability from more or less complete, but 
also more or less conflicting, material." If then, as 

'P. 7. 



ATTITUDE OF THE HISTORIAN. 55 

these critics maintain, church history is even remotely 
subject to the uncertainty and need of sifting here 
described, it is clear that the matter will be still more 
fluctuating when studied through impressions of im- 
pressions — by means of secondary or tertiary authori- 
ties, and the only hope of approximating certainty will 
lie in a direct examination of the sources themselves. 

Such a method alone promotes impartiality, for the 
calm objective study of the early church shows that 
almost every modern sect emphasizes some point of 
early doctrine or worship, while none can claim to be 
a perfect development of primitive Christianity. The 
true church historian, therefore, must sit with judicial 
calm above the water floods of party strife, tracing 
with unjaundiced eye the flow of facts and the deep 
currents of thought and feeling. He must belong to 
no church, save the Church of Christ. He must have 
a kind of honest recklessness such as perhaps no other 
student can have, for it is his duty to follow faithfully 
his narrative, listen carefully to the voices of the past, 
and record what his authorities give, regardless of his 
own preconceived notions or the hopes of any party 
or sect. The whole play of good and evil — the sphinx 
riddle multiplied a thousand fold — lies before him for 
observation and estimate. He needs knowledge and 
thought, facts and law, investigation and judgment. 
He must seek carefully to measure theory and prac- 
tice, for Christianity is both doctrine and life. He 
must mount up and distinguish faith and reason, rev- 
elation and understanding; and in the broad catholic- 
ity of truth show how the church as God's gift to man 
is above all philosophy — offers the only guide to 
eternity, and yields the only true peace to the soul. 1 

1 Cf. Ullman, Studien u Kritiken, 1829, Hft. iv. 



56 ONENESS OF THE CHURCH. 

Finally, such a study, and such a method of study, 
fill the mind with a vivid and growing sense of the 
living unity of the Church of God. The "unceasing 
purpose" of the Christian ages adds impulse to our 
prayers to-day. In the Epistle of Clement, the Presbeia 
of Athenagpras, the sermons of Chrysostom, the coun- 
sels of St. Bernhard, the theses of Luther, the treatises 
of Edwards, we catch the same tones and feel the same 
throbbings of a Christ-filled heart. Protestantism, far 
from being a product of the renaissance, or the neces- 
sary reaction of rationalism against superstition, is found 
to be in perfect unity and vital harmony with all bat- 
tling for the truth, all preaching of the gospel, all resist- 
ance unto blood striving against sin. A long, unbroken 
line of faithful, educated pastors can be traced from 
our day to Pentecost; the Lord's supper — a living 
argument — has been proclaimed on the first day of 
every week from " that night on which he was betrayed " 
until the present; the thousand sacred associations of 
Sabbath and sanctuary are fragrant with the incense of 
the ages. The intelligent student of history feels the 
thrill and pulse-beat of such an unity. He has not 
merely the wisdom and experience of the church behind 
him, but he realizes its strength, its organic and abso- 
lute oneness as the mystical body of Christ pervading 
his soul-life, making him rich not merely as the heritor 
of the ages but as the concentration in himself of the 
power of the past, and impelling him by a blessed 
necessity to transmit with increased energy to the 
generations to come " that power that makes for 
righteousness." 

The intelligent worker for God and his church must 
know the will and working of God — not merely as 
written in the Scriptures, but as told in the long story 



PAST AND PRESENT. 57 

of his providence and the grateful experience of his 
saints. An acquaintance with the past — showing what 
has been done and what left undone, what leads to 
success and what to failure, what has proved itself 
essential and what unimportant, whither certain tenden- 
cies lead and why apparent trifles must be resisted unto 
blood — is as important for the profitable church work 
of the future as the memory and experience of child- 
hood and youth are indispensable to the best efforts of 
matured manhood. Every gospel must begin with a 
genealogy of Christ in history, showing what he is and 
has been to the church. Taking up the work where 
left by our predecessors, we can build wisely and well 
only in the knowledge of their lives and plan and hope. 
Here the historian and the preacher, the antiquarian 
and the evangelist, the student and the Christian meet 
— for here all wisdom and knowledge break into life 
and growth. Based on such historic teaching, Peter 
and Stephan and Paul and our Lord himself preached 
the gospel as a fruit of the fulness of time. From this 
historic bow have the sharpest arrows of the Lord been 
ever shot against the enemies of the King. In such a 
spirit and with such an aim I desire to teach the history 
of the kingdom of God on earth — so following the life 
of Christ as set forth in the experience and doctrines 
of holy men of old, that from every mission field, from 
every seat of controversy, from every place of prayer, 
from every home of thought, from every variety of 
worship there might be heard for our encouragement 
and growth the blessed gospel of the Son of God, — 
" unto Jews a stumbling block and unto Gentiles fool- 
ishness, but unto them that are called both Jews and 
Greeks Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of 
God." 



THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORIC RESEARCH 



THEOLOGICSL STUDENT OF TO-MY 



fm jwarBss 



v Rev. HUGH MACDONALD SCOTT, B. D., 

At his Inauguration as Sweetser and Michigan Proeessor of 
Ecclesiastical History in Chicago Theological Seminary, 



THE OHAEGE, 

By Rev. TRUMAN M. POST, D. D 



PUBLISHED BY YOTE OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, 



CHICAGO: 

Jameson & Moese, Printers. 
1882. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 088 918 



